You don’t have to wait to step into the future — dance troupe Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts will take you there now.

ODC Theater co-presents the premiere of “Six Degrees of Freedom” by the Bay Area Area award-winning choreographers Sheldon Smith and Lisa Wymore. Their latest work is an exploration into how intelligent machines could generate art and how that impacts what makes us human.

The creative duo have been interested in technology since their childhoods and have used it in their dance theater pieces. They also like to grapple with philosophical questions. “We started integrating video into the work we were creating in the early 2000s because we were interested in the technology itself,” says Smith. “Now we have moved on to using it to talk about the human experience with technology and how we’ve been changed by it.”

“The computer system is making the piece,” Smith adds. “It’s drawing on all its cached data and sharing that information. It’s given us notes, text, ideas about dances. It’s trying to make art. As computers become more intelligent, they are trying to become better at their own creativity.”

“Six Degrees of Freedom” shows a computer system that anxiously confronts an unforeseen force that demands it must construct an evening-length dance performance. The finished result is a broad assemblage of choreography, video projections, and scattered ephemera, seemingly familiar and yet always slightly off. Whether you’re a dance aficionado or a hard-core techie, Smith and Wymore’s reputation for witty, physically provocative, intellectually stimulating, and deeply-felt work is calibrated to satisfy everyone.

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